1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image data transmitter that acquires image data and transmits the image data to another device. More specifically, the invention relates to an image data transmitter capable of adding supplementary information to image data and transmitting the total data. Further, the invention relates to an image data communication system configured of the image data transmitter and image data receivers at receiving ends.
2. Description of Related Art
Conventionally, a scanner is used to read a document and to acquire image data. A scanner can be used by being connected to a network with other devices, such as a personal computer and a printer. In this case, image data acquired by the scanner can be transmitted to other devices connected to the network. In regard to such usage, Japanese Unexamined Patent Application. Publication No. 08-23396 discloses techniques that correlate voice data with image data and transmit the both data. The publication describes that the techniques enable such processing as adding supplementary descriptive text to a transmission document data and transmitting an accompanying drawing relevant to telephone communications to easily be performed.
However, in such a network connection environment as described above, there are cases where scanner-read image data is desired to be transmitted to a plurality of recipients. Further, there are cases where supplementary information to be accompanied with the image data is different for individual recipients. When such case is handled with a device according to the techniques disclosed in the above-mentioned publication, data input processing has to be done for each recipient or for each group of recipients to which different supplementary information is transmitted. As such, since the same document has to be repeatedly read, the operation is intricate. Otherwise, such supplementary descriptive text and the like are only provided with respect to the entirety of image data, so that when, for example, image data is large in volume, supplementary descriptive text and the like do not effectively function.